Haseeb Ahmed
Sunset Scroll I, 2025
Graphite, gouache, kozo paper, cotton, wood, cord
150 x 150 cm
59 x 59 in
59 x 59 in
Copyright the artist & Levey Kwok
For the past decade, Haseeb Ahmed has created artwork with the wind as both subject and collaborator, reinterpreting the movements of air and matter as ecological narratives and metaphors. This...
For the past decade, Haseeb Ahmed has created artwork with the wind as both subject and collaborator, reinterpreting the movements of air and matter as ecological narratives and metaphors. This research takes many forms, from sculptural installations to film to paintings, each medium offering its own expressive possibilities. Ahmed’s paintings offer their surfaces as sites of interaction between different materials, histories, and the wind.
This scroll is a fragment of an earlier work by the artist, Stock Weather III, a site-specific installation commissioned by the 2024 Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, KR). This kinetic sculpture linked fluctuations of the stock market with wind machines inside of a miniature desert landscape, establishing a comparison between the two invisible and world-shifting forces.
Across the left of Sunset Scroll I, a papyrus motif is lifted from a rubbing of the ironwork of the Ancienne Maison Verhaeghe, an Art Nouveau landmark in Brussels. A double helix pattern is woven between the papyrus stems, and reappears as a lightly dotted line on the right of the scroll. This form has recurred in Ahmed’s work since he discovered it in a wind tunnel at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics (BE). It is a turbulence pattern which the artist refers to as the “vortex-faced being” or the “face of the wind”, used here as a talisman against the destructive power of wind. Its red and blue forms evoke high and low pressure systems, warmth and cold, while the underlying geometric tracing questions how order can be constructed from the wilderness of open space.
On the right, papyrus appears again: three rows along a riverbank, their forms inspired by ☥, the Egyptian hieroglyph for life, growth, and vitality. The hieroglyph for water appears below the reeds as a blue fragment, suggesting a fragment of the Nile itself. Ahmed paints the papyrus stems lightly, almost architecturally, bending in invisible air currents that move across the entire scene. The curves of their stalks echo the dunes of the Sahara, whose golden ochre drifts through the painting as dust—carrying with it the nutrients that sustain distant ecologies from the Amazon to Europe. As the composition morphs between deserts, rivers, and architectural fragments, it becomes a meditation on movement, breath, and origin: how every grain of dust, every gust of wind, connects worlds in perpetual transformation.
This scroll is a fragment of an earlier work by the artist, Stock Weather III, a site-specific installation commissioned by the 2024 Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, KR). This kinetic sculpture linked fluctuations of the stock market with wind machines inside of a miniature desert landscape, establishing a comparison between the two invisible and world-shifting forces.
Across the left of Sunset Scroll I, a papyrus motif is lifted from a rubbing of the ironwork of the Ancienne Maison Verhaeghe, an Art Nouveau landmark in Brussels. A double helix pattern is woven between the papyrus stems, and reappears as a lightly dotted line on the right of the scroll. This form has recurred in Ahmed’s work since he discovered it in a wind tunnel at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics (BE). It is a turbulence pattern which the artist refers to as the “vortex-faced being” or the “face of the wind”, used here as a talisman against the destructive power of wind. Its red and blue forms evoke high and low pressure systems, warmth and cold, while the underlying geometric tracing questions how order can be constructed from the wilderness of open space.
On the right, papyrus appears again: three rows along a riverbank, their forms inspired by ☥, the Egyptian hieroglyph for life, growth, and vitality. The hieroglyph for water appears below the reeds as a blue fragment, suggesting a fragment of the Nile itself. Ahmed paints the papyrus stems lightly, almost architecturally, bending in invisible air currents that move across the entire scene. The curves of their stalks echo the dunes of the Sahara, whose golden ochre drifts through the painting as dust—carrying with it the nutrients that sustain distant ecologies from the Amazon to Europe. As the composition morphs between deserts, rivers, and architectural fragments, it becomes a meditation on movement, breath, and origin: how every grain of dust, every gust of wind, connects worlds in perpetual transformation.
